Spanky here. The Engineering Team is putting together an ePlaya Summit meeting and you're invited to attend! The date is Tuesday, Feb 8th, 2005 at BMHQ. Please RSVP!! No, really, RSVP so we know which room to book and where to set up our webcam and other tools for remote folks to join in. To RSVP, send an email to eplaya at burningman dot com. Read on for the details...

Why are we having this meeting:

After the 2003 event, the ePlaya was rolled over into a new system: phpBB. This caused many technological and sociological shifts in the ePlaya world. Since then, many important decisions have been made, tried and implemented, but there is still a feeling that something is amiss. This meeting serves to address two topics.

1. The technology behind the ePlaya itself needs more stewardship. We are seeking an talented group of folks to maintain, upgrade, secure and enhance the technology side of the ePlaya. Feature requests, application upgrades and the overall usability of the board needs a dedicated group of people.

2. The community itself has gone through some tough times and decisions need to be made to assess where to go in the future, in terms of community development. We invite folks with online community experience, prior ePlaya experience and a genuine interest in fostering and growing this community to lend their time, energy and expertise.

So, if you have technical skills you'd like to appy to this project, or community development skills, or are just interested in the ePlaya in general, please come to this summit meeting! Our focus will be addressing the current state of affairs and building a roadmap for the future. This will be a high-level meeting, not the nitty gritty details type.

Why we need your help:

The Burning Man project is a volunteer driven organization and would not be possible without the help of a small army of dedicated people who volunteer their time, energy and skills to the Project in some form or another. We use many resources to facilitate volunteers to work on projects remotely, including conference calls, webcam, and our Extranet. Look below to see if you have some skills and some time you can offer to help us make the ePlaya a better place to live.

What can you do?

The ePlaya Task Force needs a broad range of skills to accomplish its mission. We have grouped the skillsets into three broad areas:

Since we're working with technology, we need people who are technically talented to help building, maintaining and upgrading the underlying systems. Not only are there direct, code-writing skills necessary, but we also needs folks who undertand how people interact with technology and how best to present our systems to be effective. We are also working on community building, and therefore need folks with experience running, building and maintaining electronic communites.

Below is a brief summary of the specific skills needed in these areas: